Win2k Pro problems - HELP!!!

[Jodie]

Ok, Win2k experts -

Machine specs: 2Proc Intel 1Ghz, 2Gig of ram, 30Gig Ultra-160 SCSI Drive (Atlas 10k RPM), 29160 controller, DVD, CD-RW, Superfloppy, etc. GeForce 3, Herc. Theater Gold sound, Winnov PCI video capture.

Was answering a post here, machine locked up and then spontaneously rebooted. Now goes through the text-boot, gets to the graphics boot and crashes with a Blue Screen of Death and a wonderfully descriptive error message:

"Unknown Hard Error"

which stays on the screen for a few tenths of a second and then spontaneously reboots itself, only to do it again and again and again. Short of the obvious answer (format and install Linux on it) anyone have any notions of how to get it back? It's been 6 days and 9hr since my last backup (that machine gets backed up weekly across the network) and I'd REALLY like to have those 6 days back, as well as having one working 2K machine... (as well as getting those 2Ghz of G@H back!)

Thanks for any advice you can give!

[viperdog]

Without knowing our motherboard..driver versions etc, I'm just guessing..heck I'd be guessing anyway.

You say it goes through the text boot ( you mean the win2k loader?), have you tried selecting VGA. The GeForce cards are great but their drivers can do some strange things at times. If you can boot into VGA only then look to update the GeForce drivers.

Did you create a recovery disk set? All else fails you can try to refresh the install, which means you will have to reload the SPs but hey save the data.

Best of luck

[wylie]

man...never thought i'd ever give you suggestions, but I had exactly the same thing happen (spontaneous reboot to BSOD with that type of error message - cant remember exact wording) on two seperate occassions. One was due to a faulty mobo voltage jumper (advised by someone in this group) the other was due to a bodgy ata100 connection which of course wouldnt affect you with scsi. I got the impression it was a generic "things are wrong" message as both were totally seperate causes.

Prob doesnt help you, however....:)

[Jodie]

Thanks!

I'm beginning to suspect that 10000 RPM is just plain wrong - I've had other problems with these type of drives in the past. I've been using a highspeed camera to take pictures of the screens before they go away... STOP: c0000221 Unknown Hard Error is the message I was getting. Now I've seen it puke in multiple places in bootup, sometimes before the graphics boot... I'll probably try tossing an IDE drive in there and seeing if the HD will stay alive long enough to be ghosted...

As I think back - several days ago there was a symptom (I bet) - VDub puked several whilst writing out and converting that "An I/O error has occured - aborting" Wish I'd caught it then...:rolleyes: :(

Thanks, though!

[Jodie]

I pulled every scrap of hardware out that wasn't vitally important to the survival of the universe (ie. the video card and the HD controller) pulled all the IDE stuff off, pulled all the ram and replaced it with 512 of known-good ram - same results... Now I'm trying to start it in Safe Mode, and it's been ten minutes and it's still sitting at the "Windows is starting up" screen... Sigh...

Oh! Wait! It's asking for my password!

[wbierman]

Re-seat your memory

Re-seat all your cards

Do you have a current ERD (Emergency Rescue Disk)?

Before GUI boot hit F8

Try booting into Safe Mode. If you can, view the Events in Event Viewer and look for specific Error mesages in the Application and System Logs

Try booting Safe Mode Command Prompt. Run chkdsk at the prompt.

In all my experiences trouble has always been hardware related. A bad driver, controller failure, disk failure, or memory failure.

Try a different video card, remove sound card, video capture and see if machine will boot.

Try Safe Mode with Logging

[Jodie]

Ok, it came up in safe. So my next task then will be to toss another NTFS formated HD in there and run 'backup' on all my precious data. Then try to ghost from the SCSI to another HD...

[Jodie]

Originally posted by wbierman
<CLIP!>

In all my experiences trouble has always been hardware related. A bad driver, controller failure, disk failure, or memory failure.

Try Safe Mode with Logging [/B]

Thanks, Will! Obviously we overlapped and are thinking along the same lines!

Think I stand a prayer of ghosting it?

[wbierman]

I just had to replace an IBM IDE less than 6 months old. Kept having bad blocks. The last set of bad blocks hosed the Registry. Put an identical drive in and restored my Active Directory install. It worked and only took an hour and 15 minutes to get back to normal.

Before trying a backup or using Ghost... run chkdsk, no sense backing up or copying corrupt data.

[Jodie]

Good answer... It gets more complicated anyway... Ghost is upset because it doesn't have a driver to read the SCSI drive. Sigh...

[Jodie]

I was almost tempted to point out that "this would be so much easier in Linux." At which time it dawned on me - "for me" is how I'd have to finish it... Be pretty sad if after 20 years it wasn't easy for me to do ANYTHING in unix...:rolleyes:

[Jodie]

Chkdsk reports 0KB in bad sectors. 107 Meg in use by the system, 65meg in use by the log file

[wbierman]

Try Ntbackup. Backup entire drive with data verify checked on. Stick new drive in. Do a basic install. Then Restore backup over fresh install.

Were you using Basic disk configuration or Dynamic disk configuration? Was the Disk partitioned? If it were partitioned, you could boot from install CD and blow out the install partition and reinstall while leaving your other partitions in place. This only works when you are using Basic Disks. So you could just backup the install partition.

[Jodie]

Sounds like work. [grin] Thanks, though! I used NTBackup to backup the registry to superfloppy. I'm doing a low-level SCSI verify on the drive now (with remap turned on)

I dug-out my 29160 disks, so my next trick will be to put the driver on a freedos disk, put gdisk (ghost) onto the same disk, reboot in the superfloppy and ghost it. If that doesn't do the trick, then I'll follow your advice and reinstall... Actually, seems like I should be able to "upgrade" and keep the data files too, right? I've been wanting to have an Advanced Server machine to play with, might be the time! (Always a silver lining, right?)

I Appreciate your help immensely!

(Wow... finished the night at 417WU - nearly an all-time low... Guess that happens when you loose a few hundred CPU hours... Sigh. Stupid machines. You know, the REAL reason I run G@H is because I hate computers... I run it just so I can see them sweat... :cool: )

[Jodie]

Originally posted by wbierman
Try Ntbackup. Backup entire drive with data verify checked on. Stick new drive in. Do a basic install. Then Restore backup over fresh install.

Were you using Basic disk configuration or Dynamic disk configuration? Was the Disk partitioned? If it were partitioned, you could boot from install CD and blow out the install partition and reinstall while leaving your other partitions in place. This only works when you are using Basic Disks. So you could just backup the install partition.

I'm inherently lazy... It was partitioned into one honkin' NTFS partition with everything dumped willynilly on it. :rolleyes: :D Basic disk config.

[wbierman]

As long as your data is seperate from programs that created the data. If you had applications on those other partitions then you might have to re-install the apps.

Also consider placing your Swap File on a seperate disk to speed system up.

I don't think it will let you "upgrade" Pro to AS. You would be forced to install to another folder such as WINNTAS. You could still boot from CD and blow out the Pro installation and install AS.

Speaking of AS....

What do you use for load balancing with your streaming media? Hardware or software or both?

[Jodie]

yeeek! It just booted in normal mode! Anyway I can image that SCSI drive onto the IDE and boot the IDE?

[wbierman]

Yes

And...you can create Extended Volumes using unallocated space from both SCSI and IDE drives.

[Jodie]

we just going to try ghosting... It booted back up into normal mode a second time... Worth a shot.

We really 'don't' per-se, do load-balancing. We provide encoding/streaming solutions to the really big boys, as an infrastructure provider. We can pose as a bunch of different types of streams, which allows load balancing and caching to be handled by those "big boys" products. Nortel, Cisco and my current favorite "big boy" - Lucent...

We work awesomely well with Lucent's WebCache and StreamCache servers - and shortly, we're work awesomely well ON those servers, too... Does that make any sense?

[wbierman]

yes it does

I heard recently of some new technology that allowed content to predict the optimum time to transmit streams thus taking advantage of "slow" traffic on network pipes. Related?

[Jodie]

Along with some of the other stuff we offer, yes, that's one thing we do... May have been us, although we've been trying to stay pretty "stealth" until we get a few of these bigger deals inked..

[Jodie]

Originally posted by viperdog
Without knowing our motherboard..driver versions etc, I'm just guessing..heck I'd be guessing anyway.

You say it goes through the text boot ( you mean the win2k loader?), have you tried selecting VGA. The GeForce cards are great but their drivers can do some strange things at times. If you can boot into VGA only then look to update the GeForce drivers.

Did you create a recovery disk set? All else fails you can try to refresh the install, which means you will have to reload the SPs but hey save the data.

Best of luck

Sorry, Viper! Didn't mean to ignore you, somehow I missed your post!

You can see kinda where this went... It's up and running and I'm pushing all the data off onto the network to be backed up later tonight. So I think I'll let that happen, launch G@H x 2 and go to bed and hope it's still alive come morning. [grin]

[viperdog]

we had faith in you....knew you could do it..:cool:

[Jodie]

Thank you! :o

[Jodie]

Ok, so why won't 2K recognize the IDE HD I put on there and rebooted? Bios recognizes it, DOS recognizes it, but Win2k won't recognize it at boot... What's the 2K equiv of Fdisk, and why isn't it in administrative tools like a good little utility? :rolleyes: :p

[viperdog]

I don't have 2000 on the machine here to look at but I thought it was still "disk admin" in w2k..did they move it to the management console?

[wbierman]

.Did you change the boot sequence in BIOS?

[wbierman]

Yes it is in the MMC. All management features are found in the MMC

[viperdog]

I can only hit reload so many times....opening up our chat function, If you want to meet me there.

[MikeTimbers]

Originally posted by wbierman
I just had to replace an IBM IDE less than 6 months old. Kept having bad blocks. The last set of bad blocks hosed the Registry. Put an identical drive in and restored my Active Directory install. It worked and only took an hour and 15 minutes to get back to normal.

Before trying a backup or using Ghost... run chkdsk, no sense backing up or copying corrupt data.

Was it a 75GXP by any chance? I spent some time this weekend swapping my "system" drive for my ghost drive.

Ghost system to backup.
Ghost backup over system so that I had two backups.
Ghost system image from backup 2 over backup to make a "new" system.
Swap drive cables, re-boot.

Drive with bad sectors is now the backup drive. Took maybe three hours tops.